


Living Things

by IMissBuffy



Category: Merlí (TV)
Genre: Gen, It's a wee bit triste, M/M, but hopeful too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IMissBuffy/pseuds/IMissBuffy
Summary: The peripatetics are lost after the death of their Aristotle, and Pol struggles to find a way to help Bruno.





	Living Things

**Author's Note:**

> I felt cheated of my opportunity to grieve Merlí, so I took matters into my own hands.
> 
> My first fanfic so be gentle with me. :)

Everything was muddled: Bruno’s thoughts, his vision as the tears welled up, his garbled words that he dumped onto the clinical tile floor to inform his friends that his father, their favorite teacher and their friend, was dead. 

He found it miraculous that his blood continued to pump and his eyes continued to see and his lungs continued to breath. Only his hands were aware that his father had died, it seemed. They shook from their place at his side. He shoved them in his pockets. 

I wasn’t existing exactly inside myself anymore, someone, his grandmother maybe, had once told him about how they had felt after the death of someone they’d loved. And it was true. He was somewhat, sort of, not completely inside himself. But he wasn’t anywhere else either. 

He felt Tania wrap her arms around him, so he hugged her back. There’s nothing worse than an unreturned hug, someone, definitely not his grandmother, had told him once. That someone was wrong. This moment was worse. He would go his entire life without a returned embrace if he could just have his father back. He began to cry harder. 

Tania stepped away, unable to control her own tears. She looked to Pol, whose eyes were fixed on Bruno. In an instant he closed the gap between them, and wrapped his arms around him, as if that’s where they’d always been, as if the reason his hands existed were to rub small circles on Bruno’s back as he cried into Pol’s shoulder. When you’re ready, I’ll help you find your way back to yourself, they said. 

Pol’s brain was thinking so many thoughts that it was a wonder nobody else could hear them. It was strange though, because he couldn’t hear them himself, really. They were loud and they were there, but they were unarticulated, faceless things. Their only purpose was to take up the ugly space grief always created in his mind. He thought maybe Bruno was feeling the same, so he placed a hand on the back of his head in an attempt to lessen the noise. They stood like that for a while until Bruno muttered Pol’s name ever so slightly into his shoulder. Pol didn’t know how to answer, or if he should. Like his thoughts, every possible response, every, “I’m sorry” and “He’s in a better place,” made the chaos in his head grow. He’d hated so intensely every single person who had told him those things when his mother died. He knew it was well- intentioned, but he didn’t need their canned sympathy, and neither did Bruno. So, Pol kissed him on the cheek instead. 

They stood like that for what felt like hours, and Pol would have stayed like that for what felt like decades, if Bruno had not taken a step back, loosely taken in his surrounding, and said, “I think I want to go home.” 

\--

They were outside now. Pol was hailing a taxi. Bruno wasn’t entirely sure how they’d gotten there. He remembered how he had clung to Pol in the elevator. His legs had forgotten about his knees, that they were supposed to bend in order to be of any use to him. Pol and his grandmother worked him into a taxi before his grandmother got in on the other side. She sat in the middle seat even though she didn’t have to. She put her hand in Bruno’s. She hadn’t said a word, which was worrisome because Bruno was fairly convinced that she was composed more of things to say than of blood and bones. But he understood her silence. Her child had died before she had. It was backwards. She was upside down.

The air changed as Pol dislocated himself gently from Bruno and began to close the door. In an instant, Bruno thought he might cease existing if he heard the door slam, so he grabbed Pol’s hand. Pol ran his hand over the knuckles of Bruno’s fingers. “Call me if you need anything, both of you.” he said. Bruno nodded. “Thank you, young man,” his grandmother managed. Pol closed the door carefully, but Bruno was fairly certain that it had shattered his eardrums. 

He watched from the window as Pol came to stand with Tania, Berta, and Oliver. The others had dispersed, meandering into cabs of their own or finding their aimless ways home. 

“Ivan doesn’t know yet,” Oliver said after the quiet. 

“He knows,” Berta answered.

“What? You texted him?”

“No. Nobody told him. But I think he knows.” 

They all nodded.

“Someone’s got to tell him, though” Oliver said before taking off in the direction of Ivan’s. Berta followed, then Tania, then Pol. The two of them lagged behind, not talking. Pol couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder, as if worried that something was behind them, or more likely, that someone was not. 

“He loves you,” Tania said. She wasn’t sure why she let it slip. It felt inappropriate given the circumstances, but also urgent. “I think he needs you,” she added. Was that permission? She wasn’t sure. 

Pol stopped looking behind him. 

There are different kinds of love. The thought had occurred to Tania the morning after their night in the woods—hers and Pol’s and Bruno’s. There are different kinds of love and the love Pol felt for her was not a placeholder. He was not waiting for something better. He was not using her to forget the past. The love Pol felt for her wasn’t a lie. She believed him when he kissed her. But that night in the woods, Pol looked up at Bruno the way Pol always looked up at Bruno. This was nothing new to Tania. Its frequency had almost inoculated her to its intensity. He had looked up at him and reached his hand into Bruno’s hair, gently pulling out a leaf, which had perched itself right above Bruno’s left ear. It was the way Pol handled the leaf as he placed it in the grass between him and Tania that almost made her look away. There was a reverence in Pol’s movements, one that Tania could feel like a heat radiating off of him, off of Bruno, too. More than a heat— a presence, a breath they both shared. 

Pol’s love for Tania was persistent. Pol’s love for Tania was genuine. But the love Pol felt for Bruno, Tania decided, was a living thing. 

“You okay?” Pol whispered. Tania shrugged. She took his hand. 

\--

The group of them sat by the fountain in the square. Berta idly braided Tania’s hair. Pol held Tania’s feet in his lap. 

“Will you text Bruno?" Oliver asked Pol, "Ask if he’s alright? If he wants to come…I don’t know, be with us, or something? Or, is that inappropriate? ”

“I don’t want to bother him.” Pol said, glancing at his phone. The reality of what had happened tonight was finally settling over Pol, quietly choking him. There was no comfort to be found anywhere, from anyone, Pol knew. But if he could just be in the same place as Bruno, he thought, maybe they would both hurt a little less. 

“I just don’t think he should be alone right now,” Oliver continued.

“Oh, give it a rest, Oliver. He has his grandmother,” Ivan grumbled from his place next to Berta. 

Oliver gave it a rest and they sat in silence for a while.

Pol’s phone lit up. Bruno. “can’t sleep.” 

He looked up to see Tania regarding him regarding his phone. She cocked her head slightly. He nodded at her, not completely sure of the question he was answering, or if she had even asked one. But she nodded back slightly before putting her head back down on Berta’s lap. 

Pol texted back, “Have you eaten” 

“yeah.”

“Are you lying?”

“yeah.”

“Can I bring you some food?”

“ok”

\--

Bruno thought he might have been on the verge of something almost synonymous with sleep when he heard a knock on the door. His feet hit the floor and took him out into the entryway where his hands unlocked and opened the door, quietly. He knew his grandmother wasn’t asleep, but it felt more than necessary to pretend.

It was Pol with a giant paper bag of food. 

“Hi,” Bruno managed. 

“Hi.”

Neither of them knew what else to say. “Hamburgers,” Pol announced, lifting the paper bag slightly.

\--

They sat next to each other on Bruno’s bed, the spread of largely uneaten food at their feet. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to be alone? I can leave, give you your space?” Pol asked after a long period of listening to the wind smack against the doors of Bruno’s balcony. 

“Don’t,” Bruno managed, placing his hand on Pol’s arm the way he had done in the cab. Pol nodded. 

Bruno yawned, but didn’t react to it, his mind somewhere else. 

“I should never have left.” Bruno said slowly. “I should never have gone to Rome. If I had just stayed…”

“Don’t do that to yourself. It’s no good,” Pol said. He started rubbing Bruno’s foot with his foot. 

“I can’t do this. I can’t be like this. I…” Bruno couldn’t think of another sentence that could possibly encompass what he meant, what he felt, so he let the “I” hang there like an overripe fruit, the only one left on the vine. 

He felt too small for himself somehow. It was like his favorite shirt that he’d found a few days ago, pushed up against the back of the bottom drawer of his dresser. He could barely fit his neck through it anymore. He couldn’t even remember why he’d liked that shirt in the first place, or if he ever really did. That was how he felt, as though he didn’t fit himself anymore. 

He wondered what his father’s last thought was. Was it something philosophical, something deep? Did he know it was coming? What was the meaning of his life? Would it stack up against the meanings of others? Or was his last thought something mundane? Was he hungry? Had he eaten breakfast that morning? Where did he put his keys? Come to think of it, Bruno couldn’t remember the last thing they had said to each other. Why couldn’t he remember? Had it been nice? Because if it hadn't, if it had been one of those snippy comments he was known to make, he didn't think he would ever forgi--

Bruno was having a panic attack, Pol knew. He’d had one the day after his mother died. He woke up the morning after it had happened and for a split second he thought it’d all been a terrible dream. And then he remembered. Reality had hit him so hard that he found himself gasping for air on his bedroom floor.

“It’s okay,” his brother had said to him, when he’d found him, still on the floor nearly thirty minutes later.

“It’s okay,” Pol told Bruno now, his voice level. 

He helped Bruno, whose eyes were wide and blood-shot, sit up straight. He placed another pillow behind him before moving to sit in front of him. Pol put his hands in Bruno’s. 

“Bruno,” he said, trying to meet Bruno’s eyes but Bruno didn’t, or couldn’t, look back at him. 

“Bruno, I need you to look at me.” Pol put his hand on Bruno’s cheek to guide him and Bruno let him. Once they’d locked eyes, Pol began to breath loudly and deliberately. His hand went back to Bruno’s and squeezed, urging Bruno to find Pol's rhythm, to match it. Steadily, Bruno’s breathing started to fall back into a normal pace, until he and Pol were in sync. Until it sounded like one breath, as though they shared the same pair of lungs.


End file.
